Link to the thesis and the demo is at the end of this page.

More than a year after its release, my level design plugin AssetPlacer has been used by hundreds of developers in countless projects, with overwhelmingly positive reception from the beginning. Even if you are a frequent user of it, you might not know, that the reason I initially designed this plugin wasn’t commercial, but it all started when I was looking for a thesis topic for my final year of computer science studies. Having developed a couple of small games in Godot, I found out about the importance of custom tools, approached my professor, and asked if it was possible to write about some level editing feature or addon. Nine months later, I handed in my Bachelor’s Thesis “An Analysis of Level Design Tools and Development of a Godot 4 Plugin”, which I want to share with you.

The thesis covers some level design concepts, a comparison of existing level design tools across engines focused on browsing, tiling, scattering and snapping, as well as a user survey. 

Finally, there is also a chapter about the development of the initial versions of the plugin, as well as user tests of it, that showed how much faster the plugin allows you to recreate a given scene. To name some numbers, users required about 30% less time to complete the scene, 30% less keystrokes and 40% less clicks and scrolls. The full data acquired by the tests can be found in the thesis.

An early mockup of the plugin

After personally meeting Robin-Yann Storm (@rystorm), who inspired me a lot, at GodotCon earlier this year, and hearing his expression of interest in the thesis, I wanted to publish it properly here for anybody to read. To provide you with the complete package, I also include the version of the plugin I submitted to my university, updated to fix some breaking bugs. 

Feel free to check it out as you read the paper (unless you already own the plugin on itch.io and can use a new version). 

You may also download and use it as a Demo before committing to purchasing the full version. Note that the demo was only tested in Godot 4.0, preview support is limited, and that many features that were added or implemented later such as the ability to save and load libraries, dynamic previews, asset zoos, terrain3D support, and many UX features are not available in the demo.

Link to the paper: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1mLH0y2ozTfkQ6tcTjn1u-QVynM5--yX6/view?usp=drive_link

Link to the demo: https://github.com/CookieBadger/assetplacer-docs/releases/